Interview with Cavan Sullivan - illinois.gov · Interview with Cavan Sullivan AIS-V-L-2008-055 June...

Interview with Cavan Sullivan AIS-V-L-2008-055

June 19, 2008

Interviewer: Mike Maniscalco

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Lincoln Presidential Library, 112 N. 6th Street, Springfield, Illinois 62701. Telephone

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Maniscalco: Today is June 19th, 2008. We're sitting just outside Petersburg, Illinois with

Cavan Sullivan. How are you doing today Cavan?

Sullivan: I'm doing very well.

Maniscalco: Great. It's been a lot of fun being here with you, walking around the farm and

seeing the different animals you're growing. Let's start out with some of the

real easy questions for you.

Sullivan: That's a good place to start. I can't guarantee you pass the easy questions.

Maniscalco: We'll get you warmed up. How about your age and date of birth.

Sullivan: I was born in April 1983. April 10, 1983. And I am 25 years old.

Maniscalco: Where were you born?

Sullivan: I was born in Springfield at St. John's hospital.

Maniscalco: And you've grown up pretty much here your entire life?

Sullivan: Yep. They brought me home from the hospital and I haven't left.

Maniscalco: You've been here ever since? Great. Now, we know that this is your mother

and father's home as well as where you live. Do you have any other relatives

in the area, around here?

Sullivan: Many. This timber joins most of my dad's brothers and sisters. He has 7

brothers and sisters and all but one of 'em, I guess all but two of 'em live

connecting to this property. I have 36 cousins that live in Menard county. So

yeah, there's a lot of us. I guess all 36 of us have grown up within a 3 mile

radius. So they're all around here. So we have many, many Sullivan relatives.

Cavan Sullivan AIS-V-L-2008-055

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Sullivans, Zimmermans, and the Turks, and the Grownwalds and the Joneses.

They're all kind of related in here.

Maniscalco: Do you know any of your family history? How your family got to this county

and everything?

Sullivan: I know some of it, yeah. I guess it would be my great great grandfather Peter

Sullivan. They moved up into the Macomb area. And that's where he lived and

he purchased some ground where the Western University golf course is, right

now is their family farm. And they lived there. And then his son started

farming there, that would be my great grandfather. He was killed in an

accident. He was mowing along the roadside with a team of horses. And a car

came around the bend and scared the horses and pulled him out in front of the

car. He died. Now my grandpa was 12 when that happened. And my grandpa

started farming their farm in Macomb at that point, until he was of age to go to

school. His sister encouraged him to go on and further his education at

Western. And he was just a phenomenal athlete. He has 16 varsity letters at

Western for: football, basketball, baseball and track. He had 4 varsity letters

for 4 years for all the sports. And he actually went on to play professional

baseball for the Baltimore Orioles. It was when they were the St. Louis

Browns. It was before they moved to Baltimore. He was a fantastic athlete.

And he farmed all the time while he was in school all the way until the farm

ended up getting sold.

And they moved down to the Petersburg area when my dad was, I guess they

lived in Oquawka, Illinois along the Mississippi for awhile after they left the

farm and my grandpa and grandma got married. And they moved to Petersburg

in the '70s. My grandpa took a job down here with the Illinois Principal's

Association. And he was actually the head of the Illinois Principal's

Association and he was one of the founding members of it. So that's kind of

what brought them down in this area. My grandmother's family is from the

Monmouth area. They have farmed there for, I don't know how many years. I

don't know what the family history is there but my grandpa Cavanaugh, my

namesake, where Cavan comes from, is from, he was born in Monmouth. He

lived there long time. My grandma said when my great grandpa was a young

kid his dad used to come home with big bags of nickels. Buffalo Bill Cody

would come through and buy hay from them. So that kind of tells you how

long they've been in the Monmouth area.

Maniscalco: Well, that's great. So I mean you really have your entire family is all around

here. You have tons of cousins. Tons of family members. What kinds of family

stories do you have about having family around here?

Sullivan: Man, there's tons of them. Not all of them that can be shared on the web here.

Maybe I shouldn't have signed that release form. Not everything should've

been checked off on there. Some stories we've got, growing up back here. We


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have all been outside, since we could, since there are so many of us. I mean,

Chelby how long are we apart, a year and six months a part. So Chelby was

just a little baby when I was a year and six months old. So when I was about

two years old, I kinda got booted outside. And said “Alright take care of

yourself.” And we had boundaries. Like we couldn't go near the pond, and we

could as far as the river. We couldn't ever cross the river or get into the river.

And DCFS probably should've been called on us a bunch of times because, I

mean, we'd just roam all over here and that's where a lot of these arrowheads

that we found. But that's really where all of us have gained this love for the

outdoors and wildlife and nature. Just spending so much time out in it.

When I was three my mom had this whistle that she gave me. That I, if I was

supposed to, if I ever got in trouble or I got in any problem I'd start blowing

this whistle. And I was out in the back pasture and that's when we used to have

cows. And the cows came and surrounded me at this waterhole, I was playing

down in the creek and I climbed up in this tree and I started blowing on this

whistle. And I think, Chelby you were with me, weren't ya? And oh we were

terrified. And Mom came running. And the cows were surrounding us. That's

there's I mean, there's just tons of stories. We've got, oh there's just tons of

them I could keep going on about.

One of our neighbors here had some ostriches he used to raise and he was

getting rid of those and he told me I could have all of his fencing if I would get

rid of the ostriches somehow, find somebody who would buy them. And this

guy from Wisconsin came down and bought them and we thought “okay we'll

get these ostrich caught for him and then we'll get the fencing.” We got two of

the five caught. No problem. Got 'em corralled up got 'em into the trailer. It

was just lickity split. I thought, “Oh this is pretty good.” Well the other three

kind of learned what we were trying to do and they didn't want to do that. So

we chased them around for awhile. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Couldn't get

'em. And one of the hens got kind of worked up and she ran into the fence and

she tripped and fell. And I mean, I was a junior in high school and full of

vinegar and I jumped on it and held it to the ground and got this hood and put

it over her head and rolled her up into the trailer. So now there's two left.

Second hen we got her to run into a fence, she went down, got her into the

trailer. No problem. The last one that's left is this big male. And he's probably

this 250-300 pound ostrich. Redneck male ostrich. And he did the same thing,

ran into a fence and tripped. I jumped on him, but I'm not heavy enough to

hold him down. He stood up. He starts running around with me on his back

and he's kicking and squawking and the joint in his leg is so they kick forward.

And I was trying to trip him to make him so he couldn't run so I kept trying to

put him in this half nelson so I was putting, I wrapped my leg around his leg

and finally got him so I got one leg trapped, then I got the other leg trapped

and we him rolled to the ground and my cousin Casey, who's my age, helped

me roll him up into the trailer. And he we got him up there, caught in the

trailer. And luckily nobody got hurt. That's the end of a lot of stories. Luckily


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nobody got hurt. There's about 15 stories I could tell right now that ends in

with luckily nobody got hurt.

Maniscalco: So now is most of your family, are they involved in farming, in agriculture?

Sullivan: Actually not. A majority of our family now is in education. Both of my parents

are school teachers. My dad teaches driver's education in Athens. He actually

just retired this year. My mom teaches elementary and middle school p.e., is

that right Chelby? She taught high school P.E. some, now it's more the

younger children at Greenview. And my dad was at Athens high school. Like I

said, my grandpa was a principal. They've all been involved with agriculture,

though.

My aunts and uncles are more in education right now. They live out in the

country but they're not really farmers, per se. But, they all, my grandpa was a

farmer when he was growing up and my grandma was from a farm. So, we all,

they all have a farm background. That was really instilled in my dad when he

spent a lot of time with my great grandfather as he was growing up. And he

really wanted to have a farm when he grew up and got older. And so that's

kind of why we have what we have because my dad really wanted his kids to

grow up on a farm. And he's given a lot of great opportunities. And all of the

things that we have done here would not have been possible without having

the land. And there were a lot of things we’ve been able to do, and we’ve had

a lot of fun and we’ve had a lot of success, but without having my parents

have the land they have had, I would not have been able to do any of it.

Maniscalco: Now, growing up on a farm, I’m sure you probably had some chores to do.

Sullivan: Yes.

Maniscalco: So what were the good chores to do?

Sullivan: Well, probably the earliest memory of doing things on the farm—probably my

first vivid memory of my whole life—I remember being in one of those little

baby backpacks, you know? My dad would get up in the morning, and he used

to milk cows. He used to have dairy cows here. And he’d put me in this little

backpack, and I remember leaning over his shoulder and petting the cows as

he was putting the cows in their milking stanchions and stuff. And so morning

chores have been something that we’ve done forever—for the last 25 years.

And good chores would always be like getting to help Dad with that kind of

stuff; getting to gather eggs used to be a good thing when there was only like

fifty chickens. Now we have 500, 600 pheasants—that’s not exactly a good

chore anymore.


5

Bad chores would probably be anything with having to clean out pens or clean

out bedding straw or pulling weeds or anything like that. Those were all things

that you really didn’t want to have to do.

Maniscalco: Now, I mean, we’ve been with your sister most of the day going around here,

and we saw your brother a little earlier. Were there still little sibling rivalries,

like, Oh, I don’t want to do that, so my sister should go clean that out?

Sullivan: Well, yes, actually, there are. The girls would always say, “Well, those are the

boys’ jobs.” Things outside that we had to do. But we were still expected to

do things inside and to take care of some of the household stuff—which is the

way it should be, but we’d always kind of go back and forth where, well,

mowing should be one of the boys’ jobs to have to do, but the girls still want

to do the mowing sometimes. But there was somewhat of a double standard,

and I think we would all agree with that.

Maniscalco: (laughter)

Sullivan: But yeah. As far as rivalries, I wouldn’t say there were rivalries. That’s

probably the thing I’m most fortunate about, is the relationship I have with my

brothers and sisters. We all have grown up together and we’re all great friends;

my sister’s fiancé is like a brother to me. I mean, he’s been around here for,

what, nine years now, Matt? I mean, we’re all just a very tight, close family.

We do everything together. When we go on vacation, we go on vacation

together; when we’ve got problems, we all deal with it together. I was in the

hospital—and I got injured playing football, and everybody—all my brothers

and sisters and cousins banded together to do my chores for me while I was in

the hospital for about thirty days. So we really try to watch out for each other

on stuff.

Maniscalco: That’s great. That’s a great support net that you’ve got.

Sullivan: Yeah.

Maniscalco: What about other friends outside of your family? I mean, growing up on the

farm, did you ever have other friends from off the farm?

Sullivan: Well, you don’t have a lot of friends when you have manure on your shoes all

the time, you know. Yes, we’ve had lots and lots of friends over the years that

love to come out to the farm and enjoy what we do out here. It’s so unique—

even just the farm life, what we do is kind of our own niche with the wildlife.

But even kids that grew up on farms, around hogs and beef cattle or poultry,

they see what we’re doing as something different and something interesting.

And even people that might be complacent with what they’ve grown up with

see our thing as something unique. And they’re like, “Wow, I'd like to see how

that works.”


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So a lot of my friends from rural areas are especially interested in it. My

friends that are into deer hunting, they love coming and seeing the deer and

helping work out with the deer. One of my friends, Zack Lancaster, has come

out on many occasions and helped us when we’re working deer and doing the

deer handling stuff. Some of my buddies from Chicago and St. Louis have

come just to visit the farm sometimes, and they’re completely blown away by,

like, I took them back there to see the buffalo like we did, and they were very

intimidated at first being that close to an animal, let alone a buffalo. So, yeah,

we have had lots and lots of friends come in. Especially once we got to

college—more people were wanting to come in and see what we had going on

here. And when you’re in high school, I mean, a lot of the people have been

here at different times, so it was more something that was commonplace to

them. But when we went to Illinois College, everybody started wanting to

come out and see our place.

Maniscalco: Now, when you went to high school, were most of the kids from rural areas or

urban areas?

Sullivan: Yes. The majority of our high school is a rural, agriculture background - where

at least one of their parents did something in an agriculture-related field, be it

being a farmer or working at one of the implement or mechanic shops or

maybe a seed company. But I would say at least, probably eighty percent of

them, their parents were involved with agriculture at some level. The other

would be people that's parents worked in Springfield and commuted from

Petersburg to Springfield. And what’s kind of sad is to see Petersburg more

shift sometimes, and to see that there’s more people living in Springfield,

working in Springfield, and it’s becoming more of a bedroom community. And

it’s kind of a challenge that Menard County is facing, where people are living

in Petersburg and paying the real-estate taxes, but that’s about it. They go to

bed in Petersburg, and they go do everything else in Springfield. So that’s a

challenge that our small, rural county is combating right now. And trying to

encourage industry and development in this area aside from agriculture, or—I

mean, we’ve got the cornfields and everything and the livestock, but the next

step in the process is somewhere else. And it would be nice to have the

industry here also.

Maniscalco: Yeah. What are some of the industries they’re trying to bring in?

Sullivan: Well, right now it’s tough. I mean, there’s talk of how it would be nice if we

could get an ethanol plant. That’s the whole new talk right now, is to produce

ethanol. But really, there wouldn’t be enough of a workforce right now in

Menard County to do something like that, because the demographics are that

there are so many elderly people, retirement-village-type-people. I mean,

they’re moving out to the country for the good life once they retire. And I’m

sure the people on the Menard County Board would probably be very upset at

me saying some of the things I am right now. But it just seems like some of


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the industries that could be attracted here—we’ve got the raw materials to do a

lot of this stuff. I mean, with the agriculture products. We’re not on an artery

like the Mississippi River for hauling grain or moving grain, but we have an

opportunity to do something. I mean, I don’t know. I’m kind of on the spot

right now trying to think of something. But there just needs to be more

opportunity for people to do work in this county and not have to go

somewhere else, is what I guess I’m saying. And that would attract more

people to come to the county that are younger couples that have kids, and you

kind of grow. And I’ve been told before by people that are involved with

county politics that ten thousand people in a population is—we’ve talked

about benchmarks before. That’s like the special number—that’s like the

magic number. When you get ten thousand people, something’s really

happened. You’ve got the jobs, you’ve got this. And I think Menard County is

at six or seven thousand people right now—I think is what the population is at.

And that includes Athens, Petersburg, Greenview, and all the little ones—

Atterbury, Tallula, Rock Creek; all the initials in Porta High School.

Petersburg, Oakford, Rock Creek, Tallula, and Atterbury.

Maniscalco: Okay. To kind of get back to the time you were in high school, now—you were

in 4-H?

Sullivan: Yes.

Maniscalco: Can you tell us a little bit about what you did in 4-H? And your involvement?

Sullivan: Well, a lot of times when you’re a kid in 4-H, you decide to join a local 4-H

chapter. And my first year I did; I joined the Blue Ribbon 4-H Club, and I was

just showing chickens, and I had a club calf, and we had some lambs and stuff

that we were showing, and some hogs. And we really enjoyed it. I was the

oldest; I was the first one to get into it. And then when my sisters Chelby and

Shilo started getting to the age where they wanted to be in it, and a couple of

my cousins decided they wanted to be in it, we decided to start our own 4-H

club.

Maniscalco: Oh, really?

Sullivan: So we started our own family 4-H club, and that went on for a couple of years.

And we all took turns being president, you know. So that’s kind of how the 4-

H went for us. And we did a lot of the volunteer stuff with the other 4-H clubs

in town. When I really started developing on the farm was through the FFA,

though.

Maniscalco: Okay.

Sullivan: When I was in sixth grade, the FFA instructor at Porta High School, Boyd

Paulsmeyer—he knew I had a lot of different… I had a bunch of turkeys and


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geese and ducks at the time. And they have an FFA show every year at the high

school where all the little kids come in and have a farm tour, basically. And he

was like, “Well, you know, we really want someone to have this and this and

this animal here.” And I was like, “Well, I’ve got some of those.” So before I

even got to high school, I mean junior high, I was bringing stuff to the high

school 4-H day, and all the little kids would come in. And so I started

participating in the FFA very early on. And once I got to high school, I knew

this was something that I wanted to do. I mean, it was something that was

going to be very up my alley. All of the classes and all of the contacts that

could be made through the FFA would be something that would benefit me a

lot.

So I joined the FFA in my freshman year and took the ag classes. And I started

my projects, which were at the time—my first year I had a beef project, I had a

swine project, I had a forage crop project, so I was keeping records on our hay

fields. I had a—did I say poultry? I think I said poultry. I don’t know; I get all

turned around.


Sullivan: But I had three or four projects, and I kept records on them. I had a wildlife

management project along with it, so I was keeping records on all of the stuff

that I was doing. I would just write down each day what I did. The wildlife

management was something that I really, really loved. That was my passion,

was going deer hunting and going out, spend time in the woods and managing,

looking at what we can do to produce big deer, more game birds, improved

habitat. And I think my second year—I guess I was a sophomore—I got

second in the state of Illinois with my wildlife management project. And I was

really excited about that. But the kid that beat me raised a bunch of pheasants.

And I thought, “Well, you know, I can raise pheasants. I’ve raised chickens

and turkeys and ducks.” And I'd raised pheasants before; my first pheasants I

got when I was twelve years old. I got 200 eggs from the state of Illinois, and I

tried hatching them out, and I hatched out like nineteen of them. It was just

terrible. It was a massacre. And of the ones I raised, half of them got loose, so

I had, like, four when I was said and done. So it was kind of a flop. But I had

raised pheasants before, and I thought, “You know, I could really do something

like this.” My sophomore year. So I started raising birds; I got, like, 200 the

first year, and gradually built it up each year after that. And then the next year,

I came back and I won the state FFA wildlife management. And I went on to

nationals, and I think I got a bronze medal in nationals with the project.

So it was something that did really well. I mean, it was something that was

unique; it was making some money, so that was always good. It was

something that I really had a lot of enjoyment for. So. Chelby who's that?

Chelby: (Inaudible speech)


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Sullivan: Oh. That was my buddy I was talking about. So what was I saying? Oh, yeah.

Maniscalco: You were talking about FFA.

Sullivan: So the FFA was really my springboard. It got me started doing a lot of this

stuff with the wildlife and agriculture. So Boyd Paulsmeyer getting me

involved with some of this stuff, that was a key thing. And I really am thankful

for having that opportunity.

And the farm grew once I went to college, because I realized I wasn’t going to

get a Division I football scholarship, so I needed some way to pay for it. And

all through high school I'd been making money, raising pheasants, and I

mowed yards and stuff to help build some capital to invest in the pheasant

farm and get it built up. But I thought, you know, I can do this. I can pay for

my school raising game birds. So I increased production somewhat in 2002

when I was going on to college, and it’s kind of snowballed ever since—some

days for the better and some days for the worse.

Maniscalco: You know, your father had a pretty conventional farm, with it being dairy

cattle.

Sullivan: Yes.

Maniscalco: How was it for you to work with him in switching it over to doing something

that’s not really so conventional?

Sullivan: At first it was like pulling teeth.

Maniscalco: Really.

Sullivan: At first, trying to get Dad convinced that this is something to do—I mean, my

dad is a very, very creative person, which is in my benefit. Because he’s very,

very insightful, and can see things done, and can see things down the road and

how things are going to turn out. And I explained to him that the wild pheasant

populations are dwindling. And there is an opportunity for people to raise

pheasants for people—for hunters—that we can fill, and I’ve got the

knowledge to do it, and we’ve got some of the facilities that we can convert to

do it. And at first, let’s just go slowly. Let’s just get a couple here, and every

year get a little bit more. Which is wise. His saying was always, “Don’t get too

big too fast.” Because I always want to jump in with both feet and both arms

just ready to go, and a big splash, and just do it. And he would want me to be

more cautious and take more thought in it. Which is good, and it keeps me

from getting overextended and doing more than I need to.

But once I convinced him that this is something that can be done and should

be done for the benefit of our farm, he was all about it. He was behind it

100%, and so was my mom. So at first it was kind of like, Okay, this is


10

something that’s new. And at first they were like, Well, I don’t know. But then

after that, it was all systems go, pretty much.

Maniscalco: Great. Now, you started to say that you’ve been able to pay for your school?

Sullivan: Yeah.

Maniscalco: Through pheasant farming?

Sullivan: Yep, yep. That’s something with all four of us kids—we talked about it; we

were told that it’s going to be our responsibility to pay for our education. And

not because parents want to be jerks, and just because they’re saying, Oh, you

know, we’re being cheapskates. It’s for us to get the most out of it. Both of my

parents, as I told you before, are in education. And they’ve seen a lot of kids

going to school where their parents pay twenty grand a year for their kid to go

and party all night long and then get kicked out at the end of their junior year

or sophomore year, just because their grades are too low, or they’re not

focusing, or they’re just wasting their time and their parents’ money. And my

parents say, you know, “We know you’re good kids; we know you guys are

hard workers. But you're going to get much more out of it if you buy it

yourself and pay for it yourself."

So they have been very, very supportive. I mean, when I started the pheasant

farm I took a loan from my dad and got the farm started. But the reason I

wanted to build the farm up was to pay for college. And that is what it has

done, and that is what it is doing for my younger brother now—he's going to

be going on to school this fall. He's going to be, I mean, he works on the

pheasant farm, the deer farm. So the deer farm, out of—I don't know if this is

something the IRS would get mad about or not—but the deer farm was created

out of necessity. The pheasant farm was doing very, very well, and during my

junior year of college, the way financial aid and FAFSA works, if you're

making money, they're wanting you to pay more money; they're expecting you

to pay more money. So I thought, "Why does it make sense for me to be

paying all this money for college because I'm being successful? Why don't I

reinvest this money back into my own business and show less of an income?"

So I thought—okay. This opportunity came to buy some deer and buy out an

existing scent company. So I did. And basically, I bought several of his deer

and I bought his contacts, is what I bought. His contact information. And from

there is what spurred the deer—because I'd been wanting to do it for a long

time, but I really didn't have a good reason enough until I thought, well, you

know, I'd save money by buying this. So I guess it's a—is it a tax shelter? I

don't know what it would be called.



11

Sullivan: I should have taken more business classes at school, rather than biology

classes. But the deer farm was created because of a financial need to have

somewhere to invest money and not be spending as much on education, I

guess. So that's neither here nor there, I guess.

Maniscalco: No, that's great. So you've basically grown up here; you've been building this

farm to basically support your education.

Sullivan: Mm-hmm.

Maniscalco: And you've gotten it to a pretty good point where it has.

Sullivan: Mm-hmm.

Maniscalco: Can you kind of explain what the farm looks like?

Sullivan: Yeah. Well, the main facet of the farm right now is the pheasants. That's the

first thing you'll see when you're coming into the driveway—you'll be blown

away by the number of pheasants that you see. And each year, we have been

producing—last year we produced about 30,000 ring-neck pheasants, half of

which we sell as day-old chicks. The other half are grown either as adult birds

or as half-grown birds and then marketed at either seven weeks or twenty

weeks. And that's kind of the pheasant end of the operation.

The second part that you would notice would be the deer. We raise white-

tailed deer, and like I said, they are raised predominantly for deer track scent.

And we also raise trophy bucks for release on shooting preserves, where they

restock genetically powerful bucks on these populations to improve the

genetics in these pens. And then the third part would be the buffalo. And

they're probably the smallest… they take up the most space, but they're the

smallest part of the business. And mostly, those are for our own consumption,

and we have about thirty people that buy buffalo from us. So that's the

smallest part of the business, but still, it takes up a large majority of the

property. That would not be suitable for the other types.

Maniscalco: What kind of buildings do you have on the property for you to do all of this?

Sullivan: Okay. Well, we have several brooder barns; we've been in one or two earlier

this morning. And they are designed to replicate a nurturing environment for

baby chicks. And that keeps the chicks at a certain temperature, which would

be about a hundred degrees to start off—ninety to a hundred degrees. And that

keeps 'em nice and warm, and that way they can develop and grow in a good

environment, where it's dry and it keeps them from getting chilled or wind

blown on them.

Another building we have toured would be the hatchery facility, and that's

where we gathered all the eggs from and bringing them too. And then that's


12

where the incubation and hatching is done. We have several out-buildings; the

deer use that barn for shelter, and there's also where we do the urine collection.

We've got several areas where we do the bottle-feeding for the fawns. Then we

have a horse-stall system, where my mom has her saddle horses. So I guess

that would be kind of a look at how many… I'm probably forgetting a couple

of them, but that's the farm buildings that we've got on the property.

Maniscalco: Now, we went up to a pasture where the buffalo were.

Sullivan: Mm-hmm.

Maniscalco: What, property-wise, do you have here?

Sullivan: On this residence there are thirty acres, and then we have about 450 up the

road. Right here, this is where the livestock operation is occurring—on this

thirty acres. The farm up the road is forage crop, so we're raising alfalfa there.

And then the row crops, like beans and corn. And it's the Sangamon River

water right now is what we're growing there right now—half the farm was

flooded. So.

Maniscalco: So that's not so good. You're growing alfalfa and corn and…?

Sullivan: Corn and soybeans.

Maniscalco: And soybeans. And that's 400 acres—are you growing that for the livestock,

or…?

Sullivan: The alfalfa is used for the livestock, yeah. The row crops are all cash rent,

where there is a tenant farmer that is farming the row crops. And we have

discussed, possibly in the next couple of years, taking that over and farming it

ourselves—when my brother's going to be out of school, and he'll have a little

bit more time, hopefully. And my goal would be to farm it ourselves. I think

we've got the know-how to do it. It's just finding the time to do it, you know.

So that would be my goal, would be to start farming it ourselves eventually.

Maniscalco: So you're renting out to the same tenant every year?

Sullivan: Yeah.

Maniscalco: Or different tenants…?

Sullivan: Yeah. There's actually two tenants that split the farm about in half. And then

each of them have their half that they farm. And they are rotating between

beans and corn, usually. I think this year they're going to go with corn again.

Well, they tried going corn again because of the prices of corn. But yeah. They

are in charge of the row crops. And they just pay a cash rent for an acres, for

each acre.


13

Maniscalco: And then you're growing the alfalfa for the livestock.

Sullivan: Yes. We're growing alfalfa for our livestock here. And what we did was, we

took—the area that's growing alfalfa now was row-crop production, but it was

low soil quality and the yields weren't as high on that land. And we thought,

well, we can put it into alfalfa, which can utilize lower-quality soil and get it

to produce more efficiently for our uses. So we put a bunch of it into alfalfa

three years ago.

Maniscalco: Okay. What other types of feed are you having to bring onto the land to feed

the livestock if you're just using the alfalfa?

Sullivan: The alfalfa is the forage crop, so that would be like a roughage for the animals.

And we don't feed the pheasants a lot of alfalfa. I mean, they can, and we do

sometimes put bales of alfalfa out for them in the winter. But their ration

consists of a pellet that we buy from a feed mill in—well, there's several of

them that we do business with. But what it is, is a high protein—about 28%

protein, it starts out with—and it's got corn in the mix, it's got soybeans in the

mix, it's got amino acids, vitamins, dicalcium phosphate; all the things that

animals need to have a balanced diet. And having a pheasant ration like that is

kind of important. That's a complete feed. Because if we mix it ourselves,

sometimes they pick out things that they want, and then they leave other parts,

so they're not getting a balanced ration. So you want them to have a pelletized

feed, is what we've found. We will supplement some corn; we might spread

some corn on the ground so that they're not picking at each other, they're

picking at the food on the ground. And the pheasants eat essentially the same

diet the whole way through; the only thing that changes is the protein level,

which is controlled by pretty much the amount of soybeans in the mix. So it

goes from twenty-eight to twenty and then down to sixteen percent, depending

on their age. So the older they are, the less protein they require.

The deer on the farm, we're bringing on a feed ration that brings on a very,

very big balanced mix of seeds. It's got roasted soybeans, it's got corn, it's got

oats, it's got yeast, it's got wheat. It's got sunflower seeds in it. It's got a

product called Calf-Manna which is like a calf supplement they use for dairy

calves that's got like a lot of high calcium in it. And then it has like an alfalfa-

meal pellet in it, and then we're also giving them supplement-alfalfa hay that

they have free access to at all times.

And the buffalo—we don't give the cow herd really any supplemental grain

unless it gets really, really cold out. Because if you give them too much grain

they get too heavy and too fat, and their calves get too big and too fat inside of

them, and you have calving problems. So you don't want to feed the cows too

much. When we're feeding out buffalo, the last sixty days, we put them on as

much corn as they want—just straight shelled corn—and then all the alfalfa

hay that they can eat. And then that kind of gives them that last little push


14

where it puts—like I said before, buffalo don't have marbling; they don't have

intramuscular-fat. But it puts a little bit of fat around the edges of the meat for

a little bit of trim to give it a more moist texture to the meat.

Maniscalco: Now, how many pheasants? Let's start with just the pheasants first.

Sullivan: Okay.

Maniscalco: How many pheasants do you keep on the farm?

Sullivan: Okay. Right now, we have close to six thousand pheasants. That's mostly

young birds. Through the year, we will progressively switch groups. So really,

there's probably not ever going to be more than five to six thousand birds at

one time; but over the course of a year, about 30,000 birds will leave the farm.

So I always tell people, "About 50,000 eggs will come through one door of the

hatchery, and about 30,000 chicks will go through the other." And that

includes some of the eggs that we sell for other people to hatch, too. So we do

sell some hatching eggs for other farms. So that's kind of what we have said

on the pheasants. There's about a total production of about 30,00 birds, but

they're not all here at one time.

Maniscalco: Now, you also have quail?

Sullivan: Yes. And the quail are something that—I used to have a breeding flock of

quail, like I do the pheasants, where I gathered eggs every day and would have

that. As far as the production of the quail, economies of scale have killed us.

Because we can only have—the amount that I have to pay for feed and the

amount of labor that goes into them and all these input costs—I can buy them

for about two cents more than I can produce them more apiece. So I've found

that if I can go ahead and buy them, it's in my best interests, where I can put

my labor better elsewhere. So I buy day-old quail from another producer, and

then we raise the quail just like we do our pheasants and market them.

Maniscalco: Now, in terms of disease, and I know we've talked about some of these things,

but in terms of disease with the birds, what sorts of things do you do to ensure

that you don't have problems with that?

Sullivan: Well, first and foremost is our biosecurity. We will absolutely not let a bird

once it's left the farm back on the facility. So that's kind of our first line of our

preventing us bringing something back to the farm. Second, I mean, we

monitor anybody that would be coming in and going from the farm. We ask

everybody questions and stuff when they're coming to the farm to make sure

that nobody has been in contact with any other poultry or any other avian

species within a reasonable amount of time. I mean, I do disinfect a lot of—a

lot of times if school groups come here, I disinfect shoes, or if people have

been around other facilities, I'll have them put on boots or something that they


15

can wear so they are not possibly tracking something back and forth. We

disinfect a lot of stuff. If it's coming from another farm or it's been possibly in

contact with another farm, we disinfect.

Control of flies is a big thing to keep disease problems down. Because when

we're raising wildlife, there is potential spread—you don't have to worry

about other farms; it's the wild population spreading disease. So you want to

limit flies, because they can be a vector for diseases back and forth from

different wildlife that might be in the area.

Sparrows are something that we have a problem with, and it always makes me

really nervous that they're going to go over to one of my hillbilly neighbors

and be eating out of one of their chicken feeders and then come over to here

and eat out of here and spread something back and forth. So the European

starlings and the sparrows are managed around here.

Maniscalco: So by "managed", do you mean…

Sullivan: Yeah, we shoot them.

Maniscalco: You're shooting them.

Sullivan: Yeah.

Maniscalco: And how do you deal with the flies?

Sullivan: With the flies, it's kind of cool—we have, like, a three-pronged attack on the

flies. First of all, there's a chemical defense; we put fly spray out. It's

Prometheran—it's a fly deterrent, and it also kills them. And we'll spray the

deer with that; we'll spray a lot of facilities with that to just kind of keep the

flies off the deer and around the pheasant feeders and the waters and around

the birds and stuff. And so that keeps the flies away. We also have—there's

these little wasps that we release, these tiny little things. And their life cycle is

that they lay eggs around the maggots and they eat them. The wasp larva eat

the maggots, I guess. So they're constantly killing fly larva. And then we also

have these fly traps, which you saw all around the property. And they operate

off a fly pheromone; it's like a reproductive pheromone, and it causes them to

just—they love it. They just love the smell, and it smells like fly sex, I guess is

what it smells like. (laughter) And they all go in there, and we actually remove

about ten pounds of flies a week up on the property.

Maniscalco: Wow.

Sullivan: So yeah. Lots of flies are removed from the property. And then—that would be

our greatest potential for problems, is the flies. So we have to keep them

down.


16

Maniscalco: OK. Now, what about… I mean, you've mentioned a few things with

equipment. But other special equipment just for handling the pheasants?

Sullivan: Well, we saw the incubators. They are very specialized equipment for what

we're doing with that. And then they have to be held with a specific

temperature and humidity, and they have to be able to turn the eggs at intervals

that would prevent the embryo from sticking to one side. So our incubators

actually turn them every hour. As far as other equipment that we use, we use

the John Deere Skids Steer quite a bit for handling manure; a manure spreader.

We use a tractor quite a bit with an auger wagon on it, where we're moving

feed to the big feeders. Probably my most indispensable piece of equipment

that I use every day is a little green wagon. If somebody ever asked me, "What

was the best birthday present that you ever got?", I'd have to say, "My little

green wagon." And then they'll say, "How old were you?" Well, I was about

22.


Sullivan: But I use that wagon every day, because it's just short enough that I can get in

the pheasant pens, and I can usually get, like, two big trash cans full of feed on

it. If I get a feeder that I can't reach with the auger wagon, I'll just take those

trash cans of feed and dump them into the feeders. So that is something I use

all of the time.

Maniscalco: What about fencing for the pheasants?

Sullivan: The pheasants require a pen that's about five and a half feet tall on the sides,

and the tops of the pens are nylon or polypropylene knotted netting. And that

keeps the pheasants in and keeps wild birds out and keeps predators out. And

it also allows the birds to fly around and fly up and not injure themselves.

Because that's something you have to worry about; pheasants—especially, as I

told you about before, we're trying to grow pheasants that are really, really

explosive off the ground. They're going to jump up and fly like a fire's been lit

underneath of them—and if you have a pen that has a solid roof, they can hurt

themselves. They can injure their necks and their heads. So you need a top

that's soft enough to absorb the shock of them hitting it continually and not

hurting them.

I mean, a big problem we have with predators is hawks and owls coming and

trying to get them through the net. So you have to have something that's

heavy-duty enough to prevent hawks from getting in, but something soft

enough that's not going to injure a bird trying to get out.

Maniscalco: Really.

Sullivan: So it's kind of a happy medium. Yeah.


17

Maniscalco: So does that happen often, though?

Sullivan: Yes. We will lose five or six pheasants a week during the fall when hawks are

kind of migrating through this area, and owls and stuff. And there's nothing we

can do about it; our hands are tied, as far as you can't do anything to remove

hawks or owls. Occasionally we'll have one that gets its feet caught in a net,

and we'll call conservation and they'll come out and relocate it.

Maniscalco: Okay. And finally, with the pheasants—let's talk about the markets, and where

you're selling them to.

Sullivan: Okay. The majority of our pheasants are destined for hunting/recreational

purposes, where they'll be restocked on land that's designated for pheasant

hunting. The birds will be released on these properties and then they will be

hunted on these properties. And it's the equivalent of a put-and-take catfish

pond, basically, where these birds are being stocked here for this purpose, for

recreational purposes.

And what it does is that it keeps a pheasant population that would sustain

hunting pressure that a wild population couldn't. Because let's say you're a

hunt club operator and you wanted to have 5,000 birds shot on your property,

to have 5,000 birds in a wild setting, you'd need hundreds and hundreds and

hundreds of acres. And with this, you could have 60, 70, 80—250 acres is the

minimum for a hunt club. But you can raise and you can do all of this on a

smaller parcel of ground. And you can control it more, where you're saying,

“All right, this number of birds is being released in this area,” and you can

manage it better. So you can say, “All right, well, we've harvested this number

of birds, so that means that there should be this many birds left out here.” I

mean, you're always going to lose some to predators, and some of them run off

and escape, but that is where the majority of our birds go to.

Now, there are some of them that are destined for dog training. Guys that train

pointing dogs and setters and different types of bird dogs come and buy birds

from us to use and aid for training their bird dogs. And they probably buy

about fifteen percent of our birds.

And then there's a very small group of our birds that get sold to guys for

eating. They'll come and buy them just to butcher them to eat. And there's

several guys that do that, but not very many. And then there are another group

of guys that like to buy birds to release on their property, just for the aesthetic

purposes. They want to establish a pheasant population because they used to

have pheasants when they were growing up and now they don't.

And a lot of that has to do—

(End of audio file sullivan_cav_01.1)


18

(Start of audio file Sullivan_cav_01.2)

Sullivan: —with the loss of habitat. And everybody knows that pheasant aren't really a

wild, I mean, they're a wild bird, but they're not native to North America. They

were imported in the 1850s from China, and the uplands of Mongolia. So

they're not, per se, a native bird to Illinois. But they've been here a long, long

time, and people like to see them. And they associate pheasants with wild

places and they like to see pheasants. So a lot of guys will come and buy birds

just to release on their farms, just so they can see them again.

Maniscalco: Now, I mean, how much are you getting for a pheasant? You know, if

somebody were to come in and say "I want to buy a bunch of pheasants from

you"?

Sullivan: Well, we have a price breakdown. Usually the way it works is October first

they are eight dollars, and then it goes up three cents per day after that. And

that is for our standard orders. Now, we have some price breaks through

buying groups of over a thousand, and that's something that we discuss and we

work on some terms if we're if we're making out some contracts with a larger

buyer. But usually it starts out with eight dollars on October 1 and then goes

up because of feed costs. And our feed costs right now are just skyrocketed

through the roof.

Maniscalco: Really.

Sullivan: Because of—well, the crop damage because of the floods this year. And

everybody's buying corn for ethanol and not for pheasant food. (laughter)

Maniscalco: Yeah. Now let's talk about the deer.

Sullivan: Okay.

Maniscalco: And what you're doing with the deer.

Sullivan: Okay.

Maniscalco: First of all, what do you have for housing the deer?

Sullivan: Well, you kind of saw when we were bottle-feeding the fawns. We've got

several places where deer have access to an inside area where they can come

in and stay dry and get warm if it's kind of cooler out. But they all have access

to outside runs where they have grass and places to run around and get in the

sun. And that's when we're doing the bottle-feeding.

As they get older, we move them out to a larger enclosure. The pen we're in

would be a pasture, but it really doesn't have any vegetation, and that's pretty

much because I want them to be eating the ration that I'm feeding them so


19

they're getting a balanced diet. In the wild, they'd be able to browse over

hundreds of acres and find all that they need to have. In a wild [captive]

setting, they're more confined, so they'd maybe just eat this kind of grass and

this kind of grass because that's all they'd be given. So this way, they're getting

a good balanced diet through the ration that I've mixed for them, and they're

not just eating up the grass on the pins. And I have on occasion replanted those

pens, but they eat it down really fast. I mean, everybody knows what deer do

to their gardens and stuff, so you can only imagine when they're enclosed in an

area. We're in the process of expanding the deer pens so we can rotate them

around to different pastures so they can have some wild vegetation to feed on

inside the pen along with what they're eating in their ration.

Maniscalco: Now, how many deer do you have?

Sullivan: Right now I have 21 breeding does, so they'll be does that will be used in you

breeding herd. And then we have the bucks. Right now we have like four

bucks, and then we have the fawns. And each year, the fawns will be

marketed, and some of them will replace some of the does in the doe herd, and

some of the does will be sold, and so we try to keep it around 20 breeding

animals, and then whatever bucks we need to have on hand.

Maniscalco: And then what are you doing in terms of disease or problems like that?

Sullivan: Well, we are a part of the Chronic Wasting Disease Testing certification

program through the state of Illinois. And what we do is that if we have a deer

that dies for any reason, whether it's old age or it gets injured and has to be put

down, we submit the head to testing for testing for chronic wasting disease,

and they examine the spinal fluid. So that's one thing that we do to help

prevent the spread of any types of diseases. They've never found chronic

wasting disease in a captive herd in Illinois. They've only found it in wild

populations up in Northern Illinois. So a lot of people blame deer farmers for

spreading chronic wasting disease when it's actually hunters and guys that are

taking wildlife from out west and bringing it back here, is more possible

vectors for the spread of it.

We are in the process of getting tested for tuberculosis and for brucellosis.

That way, we can be certified. And once you're certified for brucellosis and

TB, you can be able to ship animals anywhere in the country, as long as you

have entry permits and your chronic wasting disease level is accepted at that

state. Like, Indiana doesn't allow any deer coming from a state that has CWD

in the state, whereas Missouri has different requirements for entry. So every

state is a little bit different.

Maniscalco: Now, I mean, not everyone is raising deer. What sorts of special equipment do

you need?


20

Sullivan: Well, the most obvious is the high fences. Deer, as everybody knows, can

jump really high. So we have eight-foot fences that are required of us by the

Department of Agriculture, and we have areas where they can get away from

people. I mean, the deer we have seen, a lot of them are nice, but we have

several that are not bottle-fed, so they want to be able to get away and be

secluded. So those are kind of the two essential things for raising deer.

For handling the deer, we have a chute that we run them into the barn and put

them into the stalls where we're collecting the deer urine. And then we set up

the chute, where we can run them up reverse through the system. And then

they have to exit through this handling chute, where it basically squeezes

down on their sides, and that way, they can't struggle. I mean, they can

struggle, but they can't hurt themselves, because it's kind of pinching them

down. And then we can do any type of vet work that we need to do on them.

Maniscalco: Okay. Now, you said that you're collecting the deer urine.

Sullivan: Yeah.

Maniscalco: So what's the process with that?

Sullivan: All right. Well, it kind of sounds like a very foreign thing when someone says,

"You do what to urine? You collect the urine?" Especially my friends from St.

Louis and Chicago. They're like, "You are really a hillbilly, you know that?"


Sullivan: So, yeah. The way that whole process works—I bought the scent company

from a guy and I kind of got his ideas. The way they were doing it, they had

poured a concrete floor, and it was a sealed concrete floor. And the deer were

peeing, and it was going down the drain, and they had a bucket and this big

enclosure that they were collecting it off of. And I saw that, and it was a good

idea, but it had some flaws. There's two things that degrade urine, and that is

bacterial growth and the degradation of urea to ammonia. And those are two

things that destroy a scent product the fastest. And so I started thinking of

ways that we can prevent those two things.

Well, you can stabilize it by cooling it down. You can stabilize the urea by

cooling it down to just above freezing. You don't want to freeze it, which I'll

cover in a second. And to limit bacterial growth, you want it to be able to be

collected on a clean surface, so it's not constantly building up. So the way we

decided it—we're collecting it all on top of plastic, PVC, which can be cleaned

every time a new group of deer is brought in, which is every twelve hours

during the season. So we start collecting the first of October, and we bottle

only during the season. And we are marketing for that season. So everything

we collect this year will be sold this year, and we have no carryover from


21

season to season. The majority of the other scent companies are bottling all

summer long and all fall for next year, so they're constantly having a product

on the shelf while they're producing a next season's crop, as I guess it would

be called. And I don't see that as being, I mean, I guess it can work sometimes,

but it's not as good.

And ours is a premium product and nobody has approached it this way. One,

because it's so labor-intensive and two, because it requires a deer herd that's

very, very tame, that we can handle on a daily basis and still efficiently

produce urine. Now, if we were still wanting to make change on a national

level, we'd really have to make some big changes. Right now, we are in the

process of brokering several deals with several national chains, but they are

aware that our limitations are that we have a given volume—we can't just say,

"Oh, you want 100,000 bottles next year? Well, we can do that." We have a

finite amount of bottles that we can produce in those three months of

collection.

So when I first started I asked a guy how he did it, and he said, "Well, you

know, when we first started we used a broomstick and a milk jug." And I said

"There has got to be a better way." So that's how we came up with this barn.

The way that the barn works is, the barn is kind of built on a hill side, and the

deer enter through one end of the barn, and there are stalls all along the barn.

And they're fed in there, so they're familiar with going in. And once they go

into their stall area, the doors are shut, and it's got a false floor on the bottom

of it. It's got a PVC or, I'm sorry, it's fiberglass slats like you might see in a

nursery building in a hog barn. And it's narrow enough that the droppings don't

go through, really, but the urine drips through. And then there's PVC boards

below, so it drips through, goes to the boards, and then kind of goes chutes-

and-ladders to each stall has a collection bucket. And then we'll have a group

of does we'll put in in the evening, and in the morning we'll come in and

collect the urine, take that out of there, hose it out, go up to the facility—I

guess the garage here is where we do it; we have a room in the garage where

we do all that urine processing. Bottle it, put the labels on the boxes, put it in

the refrigerator, cool it down, and then we'll ship it out with a cold pack,

usually. So it's a twenty-four to forty-eight hour turnaround. So it's all really,

really fast. And then we'll come back. Those does will have been run out. The

pens will have dried out, and then we'll run another group of deer in. So it's

constantly rotating. So the deer don't have to spend very long in the collection

facility, so it's low-stress on them. But it's just a lot of manual labor.

Maniscalco: Now, the deer urine is being used for hunters?

Sullivan: Yes. It is being marketed to hunters for deer attracting. And the way I explain

deer scent—I mean, this is not a perfect interpretation, but it gives people that

might not be familiar with this an idea of what we're talking about. Deer urine

is like the equivalent of a MySpace page for deer. It tells what their nutritional


22

level is, what their reproductional status is, where they're kinda at in the herd,

what their health level is; so it kind of tells a little bit about this individual.

And what the goal is—most hunters want to shoot a big buck, so you're

wanting to buy deer urine from a doe to attract a buck to come in and find out

who the new girl is on the block. Or we do sell a small amount of buck urine,

which is trying to antagonize a wild buck. And say there's a new guy who just

moved in and he's looking to take over your territory. Basically, without

having to get too much in detail, that is what deer urine is used for—it's to

spark a curiosity in a wild deer, to have them come out and check. And what

that will do is bring them closer to a hunter and help them increase their odds

of getting a shot. So our slogan is "Bring 'em in close." (laughter)

And we have. We've got us a product that we’ve been working on last year—

we started, we've used a hormone therapy that we can bring the does into heat,

like they do for beef cattle or dairy cattle when they're wanting to use the

artificial insemination. So we're actually doing artificial insemination with the

deer and and we're bringing them into heat. And we can actually pinpoint

when they are in estrus, and we're bottling the urine while they're in estrus, and

we're selling that as a premium product. I can only get sixteen ounces per doe,

but that stuff is smokin' hot. And our first year testing it, a couple of my

buddies, I gave them bottles and said, "Try this out, tell me how it works." A

couple of them called me and said "Oh, man, that stuff—I got trapped in my

tree." One of my buddies put it on his boots, and a buck chased him out of the

woods and just wouldn't leave him alone. Younger bucks are more apt to be

very aggressive toward that, because they're just not familiar with anything

yet. But it's something that I say—you've got to be careful, because you can

get hurt. And knock on wood, nobody's been hurt yet, but I say—don't put it

on yourself. Put it on some towels or something. Don't put it on yourself.

Maniscalco: Yeah. Now, where exactly are you selling your products to?

Sullivan: Well, the internet is a huge, huge thing for us. And that's really what the future

of our industry is—the internet. Because it allows somebody who's basically a

nobody to reach so many more people. And it's a very, very inexpensive form

of advertising, and it's where everybody does a lot of their shopping

nowadays. They get online, and they find out what information is out there,

and that's where they make their purchasing decisions.

So that's where we're doing a lot of the marketing for the deer scent. I have

several retail stores that do buy it wholesale from us and sell it. And I also

have tons of guys that come and just buy it straight off the farm. Just by word

of mouth, or people have seen some of our ads or talked to me—they'll just

come and pick it up right off the farm.

So those are pretty much how we market the deer scent. We've got a couple of

deals I was talking about with several of the larger chains that are, I don't want


23

to name any names right now, because it's still kind of in the infancy of

developing these relationships. But a couple of the big names have taken an

interest in our product, just because of the way we're doing it; nobody else has

approached it this way. So maybe in the next couple of years, we'll be going to

a national level and we'll need to increase our facilities at a different location

and change some of the things that we're doing on that end, just so that we can

meet the demand for the volume.

Maniscalco: What would you have to do to change your facilities, exactly?

Sullivan: Just expand.

Maniscalco: Right.

Sullivan: I'd keep doing it exactly the same way, but it would be expanding the facility. I

mean, right now, I have six collection stalls. I would need to increase that to

whatever it would be. I would probably need to hire on some more work and

get my brother to be here more often. Steele—my brother Steele—he's half of

all this, but he's working right now. He's out baling hay right now. So I'll

probably hear about this for years and years and years. He was putting up hay,

and I was here giving an interview, so... (laughter)

But yeah. Steele is a half-partner in all of this. And I couldn't do the things I do

without him. Because I'm only on the farm, Monday and Tuesday during the

semester I'm up in Macomb taking classes, so he's here doing the day-to-day

stuff on Monday and Tuesday. So without him we couldn't do any of the stuff

we do, because he is really indispensable.

Maniscalco: Okay. So finally, let's talk about the buffalo.

Sullivan: Okay.

Maniscalco: (laughter) How many buffalo do you have, first of all?

Sullivan: We have nine cows and we have one herd bull, and we've got four calves from

last year, and then we've got four calves that have been born out. So that's

eighteen.

Maniscalco: And they don't have any housing out there?

Sullivan: No. The buffalo really don't like to go inside. I mean, occasionally they'll go

up to the barn here and they'll go into the barn, but they really don't like

spending much of their time inside. And that's just because they're a wild

animal. It's kind of like the pheasants and the deer. They really don't like

spending time inside, because they like to feel like they can escape. They like

to feel like they are not confined, where if there was a threat they could get

away from it. So the buffalo spend most of their time—even on a hot day like


24

today, when they could have been in the shade—they just are very, very used

to being in harsh conditions, and that is what they would prefer.

Maniscalco: Now, what about fencing?

Sullivan: The fencing we have for the buffalo is very substantial. It's high-tensile, tight-

lock, woven-wire fencing that's eight feet tall. And that would prevent them

from going through it or over it.

Maniscalco: And have you ever had any kinds of problems with that?

Sullivan: No. Well, again, knock on wood, we've never had a problem with an escape of

an animal that has tried to come through. I actually have seen a buffalo we

were unloading out of a trailer once—it was startled, and it ran right at the

fence headlong as fast as it could. It hit that fence, and the fence kind of

stretched out and flung him back. So it did exactly what the guy was selling it

said it would do. He said, "It's going to give, but it's not going to break, and it's

going to spring them back." So it's going to absorb the initial shock of them—

so it's not like hitting a concrete wall, where it will break their neck, which

would be bad if they hit it.

Maniscalco: Yeah.

Sullivan: It kind of gives, and then it pushes back.

Maniscalco: You haven't really said how you came to the decision of getting buffalo.

Sullivan: Well, that was kind of a wild deal. My dad, ever since I was a little kid, has

said "We're going to get buffalo." He also said we were going to get an

elephant, too. (laughter) But we never got an elephant. He said, "Well, hey, I

got that baby buffalo—it's going to be here next week." He would always tell

us that, and we'd always go, "Oh, it's going to be a baby buffalo!" And he

would just do it to tease us.

And for his birthday, all four of us kids talked about it, and we decided to buy

him a buffalo. We were all freshmen and sophomores in college, and we had

raised beef cattle for years. And when I went to college, we had the pheasants;

we had beef cows; we had hogs; we had not started raising the deer yet, and

my dad and I talked about it, and he was like, "Something's got to give. You're

not going to be here." And this was when I was doing my undergrad, so I was

actually away from the farm every day. I was commuting to Jacksonville from

here, so I would get up in the morning, do chores, drive over there, go to class,

then come home at night. I actually played football over there for five years.

So there were a lot of long days in there. And he said, "You know what, we

can't keep doing all of this. We've got to reduce something." So we decided to

reduce the cow herd. And so we had all this pasture that my mom had a couple


25

of horses on. And it wasn’t probably a year and a half after we got rid of the

cows that we decided to buy a couple of buffalo.

So we were at an auction barn, and my dad kept kind of saying, "Hey, we

need to get these buffalo—or we need to get some more calves for the feed

lot." Because a lot of our customers that were buying beef for their freezer

from us still wanted them. And beef prices at the time were just through the

roof. And we were at this auction, and my brothers and sisters and I, we

talked, and we were like "Hey, let's buy Dad this buffalo." And we ended up

buying four of them for him. And we put them in the feed lot, and we raised

them up and sold them, and they tasted really good, and we really liked

buffalo. And we thought it was just as good or better than any beef we'd ever

had. So from that point on, we kind of started raising buffalo.

And the next year, my dad ended up buying a couple for himself from another

herd, and then that's kind of what started the herd that we have here now.

Maniscalco: Great. Now, what do you have to do in terms of disease for your herd?

Sullivan: For the buffalo?

Maniscalco: Yeah, for the buffalo.

Sullivan: What's very nice about buffalo is that they require very little maintenance. In

this area, we're not as worried about tuberculosis or brucellosis, especially

since we're a closed herd. As far as, like, other diseases that you have to worry

about—pinkeye, you really don't have to worry about that. Other things that

you can vaccinate them for that you would vaccinate your cattle for, like

blackleg or lepto—anything like that, you can vaccinate them for. But really

what we've found with the buffalo is that the less you do to handle them, the

better off they're going to be. Because they're so big and they can get so rowdy

that they end up hurting themselves worse and getting themselves stressed out

when you're handling them than if you're actually doing it. So really, the only

veterinary care we give them is that we worm them once a year. And other

than that, they kind of are pretty sufficient. If there is a problem—let's say one

of them gets injured or something—instead of trying to do the vet work and

doctor them up and everything, we'll probably just butcher it. So that way we'll

eat it ourselves for our family. Because that way you're not pumping it full of a

bunch of antibiotics. And those are things that can really—for buffalo and for

people that are wanting to buy buffalo from us, they want it for a healthy

aspect. They're wanting it for healthy living and a healthy diet, and they don't

want something that's pumped full of a bunch of hormones and antibiotics and

stuff. So that's kind of how we do it. We don't do a lot of that stuff or try to do

any work on them like that.


26

Maniscalco: In terms of equipment, to deal with buffalo, there's got to be some other stuff

like that….?

Sullivan: Yes, there are. We have a handling facility for the buffalo which consists of

several chutes that get smaller and smaller as we run them down the line.

There is a head gate that we had talked about buying—it's about eight

thousand dollars for this head gate. It's like a beef head gate, just like that, but

it has a crash gate on the front of it, so they actually run into it. And like he

fence, it absorbs that initial shock when they're just running into it, and then

you just clamp it down on their head and squeeze them down so you can do

any of the work on them. But at this point we've not bought one of those yet.

We've not had to do any of that work on them. And if for some reason we

needed to knock one of them down to do some work on them, we do have a

tranquilizer gun that we could tranquilize it. But again, then you're using drugs

and stuff. We've not had to do that.

Maniscalco: And just as you mentioned a second ago, you're pretty much selling your

buffalo as meat.

Sullivan: Yes.

Maniscalco: To specific people?

Sullivan: Yeah. We've got a list of about thirty people that come and buy, like, a whole

or a half or a quarter buffalo. And they're kind of on a yearly basis—

everybody's kind of got their name in, so if we have buffalo ready, we call

them and we say, hey, we're taking a buffalo over to the processor. And then

the processor will call them and say "How do you want it cut up?" And they'll

say, "Well, I want this many steaks and this many ribeyes and this many

pounds of ground buffalo." So that's kind of how we handle that. And we

leave it all up to the consumer as to how they want their buffalo processed. I

mean, they could say they want it all cut up and put into hamburger if they

want, or they can say, Well, let's get as many steaks out of this as we possibly

can say, Well, let's get as many steaks out of it as we possibly can.

Maniscalco: So what's the difference in cost, comparing buffalo to beef?

Sullivan: Production costs—it costs more to produce buffalo. Because it takes longer; it

can take up to twenty-four months to produce a buffalo, where it would be

twelve to fourteen, I think, for a beef calf. They're less efficient at converting

feed into gain, so it takes more feed to convert into gain. They require more

space per animal per square foot per head—just because they are bigger and

they're kind of aggressive sometimes. So that's something that you've got to

figure in.


27

As far as selling them, on the hoof, we sell them for a dollar-ten a pound right

now on the hoof. Which is probably something we'll have to increase a little

bit; we do increase with rising corn prices and input costs. But it's maybe ten

percent higher than beef is. And really, if you went online and tried to buy

buffalo meat, it would be a lot more than if you were buying it directly off our

farm. And the reason for that is that most people who were buying from us are

people who have bought beef from us before. And they're not rich and wealthy

people; they're just local people that we've grown up with, and they had been

buying beef from us for years, and now they're buying buffalo from us. So

we're not trying to gouge them or anything like that. So we're trying to keep it

as close as we can to selling our beef prices.

Maniscalco: You mentioned, out in the field, something about genetics and buffalo.

Sullivan: Yeah.

Maniscalco: Can you talk about that?

Sullivan: I don't know what the scientific documentation behind this is, but we have

noticed that there are two kinds of buffalo, it seems like. There are what we'd

call the "nickel buffalo," like you might see on a buffalo nickel or an Indian-

head nickel. It's got really skinny hindquarters and it's got a great big hump,

and they're really light-colored, and they've got a sandy brown back. And then

there's the black buffalo. And that's kind of like the bull that we took a look at.

He's very massive through his hindquarters; he's got a lot of dark features. His

skin's a lot darker; his fur's a lot darker. And I don't know what causes that or

why there is two types in the population. And some of the calves are born to

look more like the nickels, and some of them look more like the blacks. So I

don't know where that all comes from, but one thing we have found with

buffalo, something a lot of people know—buffalo used to have so many in

their population. There used to be 30 million buffalo roaming across the

prairies of North America. And that's right when the first European settlers

arrived to in the Civil War, there was less than three hundred left after the

Civil War was over and they started eradicating them across the entire West.

So buffalo have gone through a very tight bottleneck. And so that has caused a

very, very great bottleneck effect in their genetic diversity. So they went from

having a very, very genetic diverse population to going down to a very small

group of individuals contributing genes to a population.

And so inbreeding was really a problem for a long time. It still is something

that people have to watch out for with buffalo, is inbreeding problems. And a

lot of times, if their populations are too inbred, you'll start getting midget

buffalo, dwarf buffalo, that don't grow very fast and are very, very inefficient.

And so that's something you always kinda have to watch out for.


28

And so with buffalo populations in captivity like this, you're wanting to make

sure that you're doing your best to improve the genetic diversity. You don't

want to keep inbreeding for too long, because you're going to start seeing lots

and lots of problems.

Maniscalco: So what are you doing here, specifically, to…?

Sullivan: Well, we haven't been doing it very long. So our herd bull that we've been

using—our first year that we started breeding buffalo, I think, was in 2004. So

we've had him for four years now. And he probably will, within the next two

years, be sold and will be replaced with another bull from another herd that is

clean, basically. No TB, no brucellosis, and they're tested and everything. And

it would be somebody that is not related to our cows. Because we'll be keeping

some calves back to use as replacement heifers and we'll be selling some of

the old cows. So we don't want to breed back to a father-and-daughter kind of

thing, where you're going to see problems maybe with growth, or your birth

rates and fertility can go down when you start inbreeding like that. And they

start liking banjo music and that kind of stuff. (laughter)

Maniscalco: (laughter) What kind of cost are you talking about to get a new bull?

Sullivan: It kind of depends on who you're buying from. We might just talk to a couple

of guys that we know that raise buffalo and say, "We'll trade you our herd bull

for your herd bull." And so then you're changing out two different genetics

that way. I might say, "Well, we've got a couple of bull calves in here—what if

we switch to you a couple of our bull calves, and then we grow out theirs and

they grow out ours, and if one of them looks good, then we'll take that one?" I

mean, if you went to a big buffalo ranch and wanted to buy a herd bull, you

could be looking at four or five thousand dollars, maybe. If you're wanting to

buy from a premier herd, this is the one to buy. You can spend a lot of money.

You could probably spend as much money on one as you wanted to spend. It

could go up and up and up, as far as people that you are talking to and

different individuals that are involved in it. But it could be as high as, like I

said, five or six or seven thousand dollars—or it could be down in the eleven

hundred dollar range.

Maniscalco: That's interesting. You know, what's really interesting to me is that here you've

put together this really large business kind of by yourself, with the help of your

brother, and your sisters probably helped you out some as well.

Sullivan: Oh, yeah.

Maniscalco: And you're funding your college degree through that. Can you talk a little bit

about your college, and what you've done?


29

Sullivan: Yeah. As an undergrad, I went to Illinois College in Jacksonville. And I

wanted to go someplace fairly close to home so I could continue doing what I

was on the farm. So I commuted from Jacksonville; it's about a forty-five-

minute drive from here to Jacksonville, so that's really not bad at all. And at

Illinois College, when I first got there, I was kind of just not sure what I

wanted to do. I was kind of thinking that I wanted to be a schoolteacher, like

my folks were; that was kind of the family tradition to do. But I knew I really

liked doing this, so I kind of thought, Maybe I'll be an ag teacher and a

football coach or something. Because I really enjoyed playing football, and I

played there at Illinois College for five years. So I really wanted to do

something along those lines.

And while I was there, I took a couple of classes from a professor—her name

was Dr. Beal, Dr. Deborah Beal. And she completely opened my eyes to this

whole world of science. And I've always been interested in nature and wildlife

and the outdoors, but she kind of opened my eyes to a different side of it. And

her major that she taught was in environmental science. And I thought, “Wow,

this is really great. I really like this.” And I started taking her classes and really

enjoyed it and had a lot of fun taking her classes. And she had taken us across

the country. I've been up in the North Woods with her in classes; we were

hiking through the Upper Peninsula, kayaking on Lake Superior. She took a

class out to the Grand Canyon before, I think. I've been down to the

Everglades with her and her husband on five different occasions, paddling

with alligators and going on different tours. I've been down to Mexico with

her twice. So she's completely broadened my horizons on all this stuff, as far

as the science part of this business goes.

I decided on an environmental science major, and she kept encouraging me to

take biology classes along with environmental science. She said, "You really

could be a double-major, you know; you could get environmental science, and

then you could get biology, because they kind of go together. They really feed

off of each other, because environmental science is a lot of the application of

things in the biological field, and a lot of the reasons you might want to learn

something in the biological field is so that you can apply it to environmental

science."

So I decided to get a double-major in environmental science and in biology.

And I also ended up getting a minor in chemistry for some crazy reason—I'll

never, ever figure out why I did that, other than the fact that, I don't know. I

still can't come up with a good reason. Maybe there was a good-looking girl in

the class. I don't know. (laughter) But I did get a minor in chemistry. And I

graduated, and I really wasn't sure what I wanted to do with it. The reason I

developed this farm was to pay for school. It was a means to an end; it was

never supposed to be the end. I just thought, Oh, I'd make enough money to

pay for school and then go on and do whatever else I was planning on doing.

And really, truly, what I had seen myself doing was going to school for four


30

years, playing football, having a good time, getting a degree, and then going to

OCS and going into the Marine Corps. That is what I saw myself doing. And

the way this farm was developed—it kind of has given me another opportunity

to do something else. I still tried to pursue the Marine Corps avenue after I

graduated, but I was injured playing football, and it was a disqualification for

service. So unfortunately—my mom and my grandmother keep saying to me

that it was God telling me that I need to do something else. But that kind of

helped me say, Okay, so this maybe was what I meant to do.

So I decided to keep doing the farm thing. And my professor, Dr. Beal, she is

the reason I am now in grad school. After I graduated from Illinois College in

2006 or 2007—I don't really remember—she kept saying, "You need to go to

grad school. No, you need to go to grad school, It would be a great thing for

you; you'd do really well." And I'm not Johnny Student. I never have been. I

liked going to school, but I never saw myself going on and getting a Master's

and all this. But she was like, "No, you need to. You need to do this. You need

to go on in school." So she convinced me to go to Western and get a Master's

in biology. So right now I am one semester away, hopefully, from graduating

with a Master's in biology. All I have to do now—I've got all my classes taken,

and I just need to complete my thesis. And that's what I've talked a little bit

about, what my research is going to be. We’re correlating the ring-neck

pheasants' sexual ornamentation, like the tail length and the spurs and UV

reflectiveness of the feathers—we're trying to correlate that with the mobility

of the sperm. And seeing if there's—basically, do these ornaments honestly

advertise how fertile a male is? So can a female look at a male and say, "Well,

this is a good male—he's fertile because he's got a long tail and he's got big

spurs"?

So that's what we're looking at. And I could probably go on and on about that

for another half hour. But usually people start falling asleep when I start

talking about my research.

Maniscalco: No, that's cool. That's great. So, real quick—what are the key things in

pheasants? You mentioned a couple of them, the tails and the spurs…

Sullivan: Well, that's one thing we're looking at right now. I'm trying to find a couple of

papers on things that people have already found. One guy did a paper—the

title of the paper was "Pheasant Hens Prefer Males with Large Spurs". And his

take on it was, he took a genetic sampling of a group of male pheasants, and

then he put these males with this group of females, and then came back and

tested the paternity of all the chicks. And the majority of the chicks were sired

by the males with the longer spurs. So he goes, "Aha! These females are

selecting for males with longer spurs!" Which—I can see his argument there,

and that's what I'm using in my thesis, is that if these females are selecting for

these specific traits, then there should be some sort of reproductive benefit. In

nature, there's not waste. There's no waste. They're not looking at specific


31

things just for no reason. There are reasons—like, peacocks prefer males with

longer tails, because that signals to them—there's several hypotheses about

why that is. One could mean that they have a low parasite load. One may mean

that they have this great big tail but they're still able to escape from predators;

they must be really good males, because they've got a big encumbrance, but

still they're able to get away and be reproductively active. And so I'm trying to

go back and forth with some of the stuff that other people have done, some of

the other research—kind of standing on the shoulders of giants on some of this

animal behavior stuff.

But there's other reasons there are a couple of things I wanted to look at with

the pheasants that that same guy did, and nobody has proposed this yet—that

the spurs that you see in galliforms, like chickens and turkeys and pheasants;

that's that little bony projection on the back side of their leg—they always say

that they're being used for introspecific competition between males. Like,

they're being used for fighting and combat. So you see these cock fights down

in South America; these roosters are jumping each other and using their spurs

to injure and damage the other one. And really, I don't think that's the case.

Growing up here, I've watched a lot of the chickens fighting in the barn and

pheasants fighting each other, and the spurs are very very, actually very

seldom in contact. They're very seldom used in contact in these fights. And so

I kind of have a feeling that there's something else going on. And I think the

reason these males that this guy found in his paper were more successful in

these reproductions were that they were actually using these spurs—I call it

"the bull rider hypothesis". If a bull rider was riding a bull and had no spurs

on, he would be thrown off a lot faster than if he does. So the males with

longer spurs are able to mechanically stay on the female a little bit longer to

secure more breeding. So that's kinda where… I don't know. I need to clarify

these thoughts a lot more in my head before I actually develop them, but that's

kind of what my research is centered around.

Maniscalco: All right. Great. That's really interesting. Now, there's a lot of work to do here.

Sullivan: There's never a dull moment, that's for sure.

Maniscalco: And you're going to school on top of all of that. Who else is helping you,

besides—you have a brother who is helping you?

Sullivan: Yes. My brother does tons and tons. And my sister does a ton. My sister

Chelby—you've seen what she's done today. I feel so fortunate and so blessed

to have the family that I have. It's a great support system, and we are always

supporting each other in everything that we're doing. And I feel like I get the

lion's share of that support. I have a lot of different things going on, and all the

time I will call them and say, "Hey, I'm going to be a little bit late, can you go

gather eggs for me?" Or, "I've got this going on and this going on—can you

give me a hand doing this?" They always kid me I don't pay very well, but


32

they get compensated somewhat for it. But I'm always there to help them out if

they're needing something, or I try to be, at least. But I do think that I get the

better deal, because they are very, very good about helping me out.

Maniscalco: So how does that work? If they're helping you out, are you paying them?

Sullivan: Yeah. I pay Steele, what he's doing is, he's buying a share in the business. So

every hour he works is going towards him buying his share in the business and

investing. We've figured out that we've got half of the equipment, half of this

and this and this. So eventually, he will be a 50% partner in it.

And Chelby and Shilo, both of them have helped out at different times, and

Matt, and I'll pay them for helping out. And a lot of times, they don't want to

be paid; they'll say, "Oh, no, I just want to help you out." But I try to pay

them. And they'll kid me after that, "Oh, you don't ever pay me." (laughter)

And it's a good thing they're asleep over there.

Maniscalco: Oh, that's great. Now, how about government programs and government issues

and things like that? I mean, wildlife is totally different.

Sullivan: Yes. We have lots and lots of questions about that. Usually that's the first

question: How can you guys raise deer and pheasants? They're wild animals.

How do you get licensed to do that? And there is a permit called the Class B

Game Breeding License. And that gives the holder the right to raise—you can't

collect from the wild; that's totally different. You can't go out and take them

from the wild and raise them from there. You have to buy them from a

licensed breeder. So somebody down the line, somebody got them from the

wild, but it was many, many generations ago.

So the license that we have allows us to raise deer, game birds, turkeys. I guess

you can have rabbits. There's ferrets. There's all kinds of native wildlife that

can be raised from these permits. And that's through the state level. Through

the federal level, we used to have a Federal Migratory Game Bird Permit,

which was when we had Canada geese and some ducks. That was awhile ago.

We are a part of the pollorium typhoid testing in our program, where we

blood-test ten percent of our pheasant population every year for pollorium

typhoid, which is a national organization. I said before that we test for avian

influenza or we have tested for avian influenza. So we answer to a lot more

bureaucracy than, say, a cattle farmer or a horse farmer. Because we are

managing wildlife. And the way the state of Illinois deems it is that deer

belong to the state of Illinois; they're just allowing us to raise them. And it's

kind of funny—where most of our deer came from, which is Pennsylvania,

they are individuals' property. They are owned by the individual; that's the way

that it is, just like somebody's cow or somebody's dog. If you buy a deer, you

own it; it's yours. And once they come into Illinois, they are owned by the

state, but we're taking care of them, and they're allowing us to take care of


33

them. So I don't really know exactly—I mean, there's a lot of gray area in the

laws on that. I always say, though, "Well, if they're the state's deer, then I'll just

send them the feed bill at the end of the year, and they can foot the feed bill if

they really want to have ownership in them." (laughter) So, yeah. There is a lot

of red tape and bureaucracy that we have to go through when we're wanting to

move deer from another state, from state to state, or if we're wanting to import

deer. So, yeah. It's something that we have to deal with. If the cattle industry or

the hog industry had to go through the rigorous testing that we have to go

through with the deer or the pheasants, it would break the industry. The

industry would completely fall apart.

So that's something that we've had to combat really a lot. And we're really

hoping that eventually deer will get under the Department of Ag and the

pheasants will get under the Department of Ag, where they're managed like

they do traditional livestock.

Maniscalco: Are there movements to do that?

Sullivan: Yes, there are. But up to this point they've not been effective. We've got

several lobbyists for the Illinois Deer Farmers' Association that have been

trying to do that for a long time, but who knows how that will all turn out. I

mean, it would be good for us because right now we already answer to the

Department of Ag for our health testing stuff, but we still have to answer to

the DNR, because they say that the deer are theirs. The deer belong to the

public, because they're a wild animal. So I don't know.

Maniscalco: Interesting. What about buffalo?

Sullivan: No, buffalo—it's kind of interesting. Even though buffalo are a native species

to Illinois, they're kind of in the same wad as cattle. They're just kind of

grouped in that same genre, I guess, of animals.

Maniscalco: So, then, the buffalo are under the…?

Sullivan: Department of Ag.

Maniscalco: Department of Ag?

Sullivan: Yeah.

Maniscalco: Interesting. What about your neighbors? I mean, you're doing some really

different things here—

Sullivan: (laughter) Yeah.

Maniscalco: —to the normal farmer, and how are your neighbors.


34

Sullivan: Yeah. That's probably the number-one challenge that we're facing at this time,

is our neighbors. The urban sprawl that's kind of engulfing us. We've lived

here on this property for thirty years. I've been here for twenty-five, and my

folks had been here five years before I was born. So we'd been here close to

thirty years, and as the years progressed, more and more people have been

moving to the country or starting to become surrounded. Our little farm is

becoming an island in the middle of an urban sprawl. And many of the people

are very, very curious about what we're doing, and they're very interested.

There's half a dozen kids that come down here on a regular basis and help me

bottle-feed the fawns and help gather the eggs, or just come out and see the

horses. My mom takes them on horseback rides. So there's a lot of kids that

are from an urban environment that want to learn about the rural area, and they

love living in the country. And their parents moved out here for that reason, so

they can be exposed to the rural life. But then there's some of them that are a

bunch of, I don't know. I could say a lot of not very nice things about them.

Because they tried to get our farm shut down last year.

Maniscalco: Really?

Sullivan: They tried saying that our farm was a health hazard. They accused us of doing

everything from spreading bird flu, histoplasmosis, airborne e. coli. They tried

to sic the EPA on us, saying that we were polluting the rivers, saying that we

were dumping illegally. They were trying to say that we didn't have permits to

do what we were doing, saying that animal welfare stuff—we weren't taking

care of the animals. They made all these completely unjustified accusations,

trying to get us shut down. That's what they were trying to do. And that really,

really was not good. I mean, they caused us a lot of grief on that. We ended up

spending a lot of money on an attorney, trying to fight this whole thing. In

1999, our county decided that this area between Petersburg and Athens would

be a great rural-residential zone, or R1 zone. So they decided to zone this area

R1, so they could build houses. But they never came out to assess what was

going on in this area. So there was a huge chunk of farming ground that got

zoned R1 that should not have ever been. So that was not a big deal because

nobody ever came out to check it; we were zoned R1, and it didn't really

matter. We were grandfathered in agriculture, because we had all this stuff

going. Well, when their lawyer found out that our property was zoned R1, they

started saying, “Well, wait a second. How can the Sullivans do all this stuff,

because it's zoned improperly?”

Maniscalco: How did you end up dealing with all this stuff, bombarding you after awhile?

Sullivan: It finally all came to a head about a month ago. The county board had a big

vote on it, and they voted five to nothing in our favor. So all five of the county

board members said, "The Sullivans are legal. They're doing everything right.

They are not in violation of anything that we have found." And on every step

of the way, I invited anybody into our house. I said, "I'll come down and give


35

you a tour. I'll show you everything we do. We have no secrets to hide.

Anybody is welcome here to see what we do." And they said, "You guys are

fine." They said, "As far as farms go, you guys are doing very, very well." As

far as trying to protect the environment, and helping out the waters. It's not

like it's a huge hog farm where we're having a lagoon that's dumping animal

waste into a stream. I mean, we are trying to preserve the natural. We're going

back to nature. We're raising wildlife here, for Pete's sake.

So it's been kind of quiet the last couple of weeks from them. They haven't

said anything. But it's something that we're going to have problems with, I

have a feeling, down the road. It's going to be something that we will always

have a rub from now on. And it's just that when you deal with people that don't

understand wildlife and don't understand how nature works and how

agriculture works, they see it as a threat to their safety. One lady thought that

the buffalo were going to get loose and stampede her children. She stood up in

a public meeting and said, "I'm afraid the buffalo are going to get loose, and

they're going to stampede our children." And another lady was scared because

the pheasants—we had a snowstorm come through and rip down the pheasant

nets and a bunch of pheasants got loose. And the pheasants came up into her

yard and drank some water out of her dog water bowls. And she said that that

was just horrible for her. She just couldn't stand it. We had a lot of people—

one lady was scared she was going to get Lyme disease from the deer, because

deer ticks are on deer. I said, "Well, we actually put a tick spray on the deer to

keep ticks off of them." So I said, "You don't have a dog in your house, do

you?" She said, "Yeah, we have a dog." I said, "It doesn't go outside,

though?" "Yeah." "Well, it could just as likely be on your dog as it could be

on one of our deer." So the county board saw all this, and they went through

and they looked at everything very closely, because they wanted to do their

job. But they found that we were doing absolutely nothing wrong, and these

people were completely unjustified in their complaints.

So all it is is that we spent a bunch of money on our attorney, they spent tons

and tons of money on their attorney, and they lost. So they have not said

anything much. And what's funny is that a lot of their kids are some of the kids

that still come down. And it kind of makes me feel good that they go home

and the kids tell about what they did today and they come down here and play.

You know?

Maniscalco: What's the future for wild game farming?

Sullivan: Well, in the near future, it seems to be very good. Because for one, the baby

boomer generation grew up hunting—they did a lot of hunting with their dads

growing up. So they are very, very outdoor-oriented. So sport shooting is

something that, in that generation, there's a lot of people that still enjoy that.

The next twenty years will be very good for us as these guys start retiring and

they've got more time on their hands. But after that, it could be a little bit less.


36

Because there's less and less people from my generation that are actually out

and enjoying the outdoors in that aspect. There's more recreation outside—

bicycle riding, kayaking, this kind of stuff. But the shooting sports are

something that a lot of kids don't have access to. And it kind of concerns me

down the road: is there going to be as big of a demand for pheasants for

people to do sports shooting as there is now. Or is there going to be a demand

for deer scent now as there was now? So that's something that always concerns

me down the road, is to look in the far view and say, “Well, are we going to be

able to do this for the next fifty years, or is this going to be something that's

just going to be a flash in the pan and disappear?”

So I don't know. It's going to be interesting to see how it all turns out. I know,

for one thing, we're going to need to move from this location. As much as I

love this place, I mean, we've kind of maxed out, expansion-wise, what we

can do here. So I'm looking and am in the process of expanding the farm in

another location.

Maniscalco: Have you picked someplace, or…?

Sullivan: Well, there's the farm that we have here and the farm that we have up the road,

and then there's a couple of other properties that I'm looking at to possibly buy.

The land market right now is so high, though, in Menard County, that it's hard

to justify spending six or eight thousand dollars an acre to raise pheasants on it

when you can raise pheasants on pretty low-quality ground. They don't need

the best black dirt in central Illinois to raise them on when you can raise them

on sand if you wanted to. So we've got a couple of places that we've been

looking at. And I would say in the next probably two years, we'll have another

branch of the farm somewhere else, and we'll start shifting more towards

another location.

Maniscalco: You know, there's so many difficult things that are kind of coming towards

you.

Sullivan: Yeah—on the horizon.

Maniscalco: What's making you get up in the morning to go out and do your morning

chores and things like that?

Sullivan: Pretty much the fact that I get to do this myself. And if I fail it's going to be up

to me, and if I succeed, it's going to be up to me. Hopefully it's not up to my

neighbors. (laughter) I guess that's what I love about it the most, is that it

allows me to have my own destiny in my own hands, and allows me to do

something I love and allows me to do something that I could use my education

for something. And it's just a challenge. I guess, more than anything, when you

say, "What makes you get up in the morning and do it?" It's the challenge of

being able to say, "Yeah, I did this. I started from nothing and I built this


37

business into here." So I think that's probably what does it—it's that challenge

of saying, "Well, can I do this? Let's try."

Maniscalco: Well, I have one more question for you.

Sullivan: Okay.

Maniscalco: And this is the question that everybody gets asked.

Sullivan: Okay.

Maniscalco: That I do all oral history interview with. And that's the fact that this is an oral

history that I'm doing. And you even mentioned earlier that this is going to be

around forever.

Sullivan: Right.

Maniscalco: And one day down the road, there could be some great-great-grandkids of

Cavan Sullivan that will walk into…

Sullivan: I've got to get a girlfriend first.

Maniscalco: (laughter) Well, it's, you know—but it could happen that they'd walk into the

museum and say, "Hey, look, there's Great-great-grandpa's interview." What's

the thing that you want them to find out from here?

Sullivan: I hope they don't lose there roots. If I end up having grandkids, which, who

knows if that's in my future or not, I hope that they remember where they came

from. And that's another part of what I bring to the table. I feel like I'm deeply

rooted in agriculture in Illinois. I have been farming my entire life; ever since I

was little, my first memory was helping my dad milk cows. And then to look

back and say—My dad's farther did that most of his life. He was a farmer. And

then his dad did that his whole life; he was a farmer. And so as long as the

Sullivans have been in the United States—they came over from Ireland during

the Potato Famine, and they were farmers back in Ireland. So as long as you

go back in history, the Sullivan family have been farmers. And I feel very, very

connected to my history, not only here in my roots in Illinois, but all the way

back into Ireland and back, way back into my ancestors' history. I think that's

really neat. And I hope that any future generations of the Sullivan family, even

if they aren't farmers, I hope that they still remember these roots and the values

that have taught all of us about hard work and being able to weather out

storms. Whether it's actual physical nature-storms or storms that have been

brought on by neighbors or bureaucracy or anything like that. So just

remember where they came from and the people who have worked really hard

to do this.


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And like I said before, I could have done nothing that I have done without my

parents. And I wish that they could be here today, but they're out gallivanting

across the country on their second honeymoon. My dad retired this year, and

they'd been talking for a long, long time about going to Hawaii, so he took my

mom. Their anniversary was on June ninth, and he took her to Hawaii for their

second honeymoon. So I wish they could be here.

Maniscalco: Well, they can watch.

Sullivan: Yeah. They can log onto the Internet and watch it someday.

Maniscalco: There you go. Well, thank you very much.

Sullivan: Yeah. I've really enjoyed this. Well, thanks, guys.

(End of interview)

Interview with Cavan Sullivan - illinois.gov · Interview with Cavan Sullivan AIS-V-L-2008-055 June...

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